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tel aviv museum of art by preston scott cohen

Located in the center of the city's cultural complex, the program for
the Tel Aviv Museum of Art Amir Building posed an extraordinary
architectural challenge: to resolve the tension between the tight,
idiosyncratic triangular site and the museum's need for a series of
large, neutral rectangular galleries. The solution: subtly twisting
geometric surfaces (hyperbolic parabolas) that connect the disparate
angles between the galleries and the context while refracting natural
light into the deepest recesses of the half buried building.

The building represents an unusual synthesis of two opposing paradigms
for the contemporary museum: the museum of neutral white boxes and the
museum of architectural spectacle. Individual, rectangular galleries are
organized around the "Lightfall", an eighty-seven foot tall spiraling
atrium. The building is composed according to multiple axes that deviate
significantly from floor to floor. In essence, it is a series of
independent plans and steel structural systems stacked one atop the
other, connected by geometric episodes of vertical circulation.

The new building refers to the original building in such a way that the
two can be seen as having a family resemblance. At the same time, it
relates to a larger tradition of the new that exists within Israeli
architectural culture. The multiple vocabularies of Mendelsohn and
Bauhaus Modernism in Tel Aviv are re-synthesized in an architectural
language that is internationalist and progressive in its cultural
orientation.